Published 8:00 pm, Tuesday, June 24, 2003

David Rupert, 51, a New York native who has been in an FBI witness protection program since 2001, spent his third day of testimony at Dublin's no-jury Special Criminal Court detailing his many meetings with Michael McKevitt and other reputed senior Real IRA figures.

McKevitt, 53, could receive a life sentence if convicted of "directing terrorism," a charge created in response to the Real IRA's 1998 car bombing in the town of Omagh that killed 29 people. Traditionally, IRA commanders have been extremely difficult to jail because they do not personally handle weapons _ and nobody will testify against them.

Rupert, a 6-foot-6 trucker recruited by the FBI in 1994 to gather intelligence on anti-British extremists in Ireland and the United States, is the key witness against McKevitt. He is the first American spy ever to feature in an Irish terrorist trial.

He told the three judges who handle IRA-related cases in Ireland that he met McKevitt repeatedly in late 1999 after being introduced as a well-placed organizer among Irish-American extremists in Chicago, whom he had already fooled into thinking he was a major smuggler.

He said that during discussions in McKevitt's home near Dundalk, an Irish border town, McKevitt admitted serving in the 1980s and 1990s as the IRA's supreme "quartermaster" responsible for maintaining the outlawed group's secret network of arms dumps.

When the IRA called a cease-fire in 1997, McKevitt defected "with most of the IRA's engineering staff and all of the quartermaster staff" and commandeered the most useful weapons, particularly small arms and Semtex plastic explosive, for use by his fledgling Real IRA faction, Rupert said.

At the time Rupert befriended McKevitt, the Real IRA was reeling from the public-relations disaster of Omagh _ the deadliest terror attack in Northern Ireland history _ and had called a truce.

"They were licking their wounds. … They were trying to regroup," Rupert said.

At that meeting, Rupert said he was invited to discuss what he could do to secure arms and finances from Irish-American sympathizers.

"Just about everybody was pushing for a restart of hostilities," Rupert said _ but McKevitt wanted to wait "for the right time and right venue."

McKevitt's ideal time, Rupert said, was the moment when the mainstream IRA began to "decommission" its weapons as Northern Ireland's Good Friday peace accord had proposed. The target appeared to be Stormont Parliamentary Building, headquarters of the province's Catholic-Protestant government.

McKevitt, the spy said, calculated there would be "massive grass-roots disapproval" among IRA members if their leaders began surrendering weapons.

Irish police arrested McKevitt in March 2001 based on Rupert's allegations. Other senior Real IRA figures were rounded up on lesser charges. This crackdown crippled the organization before the mainstream IRA began to scrap its weapons in October 2001.

"He was hoping to take the war, so to speak, to the steps of Stormont. He was also hoping to take it to the financial district in the heart of the U.K. (United Kingdom). He was also interested in the assassination of cops," Rupert said.

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McKevitt listened impassively as he sat among his lawyers and flanked by two police officers.